


you know you'll always know me

by bigfootsflannel



Series: the road not taken looks real good now [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 08:48:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28685877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigfootsflannel/pseuds/bigfootsflannel
Summary: Felix and Sylvain love each other. They live on opposite coasts.[follow-up to 'it always leads to you and my hometown']
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, background dimiclaude - Relationship
Series: the road not taken looks real good now [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2102577
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	you know you'll always know me

**Author's Note:**

> so this is a companion piece to [it always leads to you and my hometown](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28165791). i _think_ this reads okay without having read that first, but there's a big chunk in the middle that i skate over because it's covered in the other fic?? overall, i would recommend reading that first

When Sylvain first says that he's moving to Los Angeles, Felix thinks that it's a joke.

But then he starts packing his things and it becomes far too real. He hands off some of his things that he says he won't need but doesn't want to risk his parents getting rid of. “For safekeeping,” he says.

Felix doesn't know why he's actually taking any of it. He barely has space for his own things, and he really doesn't need to take more of Sylvain's shit. “I'm not a storage unit,” he tells him.

“Even if I pay rent?”

He scoffs. “I don't need that. And I think that you're going to need all the money you can get off you're going to live in California. What are you even going to do out there?”

Sylvain shrugs, folding the corners of a cardboard box to close up the top. “I admit, I'm not sure,” he says, and the quiet, protective part of Felix's mind wants to fuss at him for it. Suddenly uprooting himself and moving across the country where he knows no one without even a crumb of a plan can't possibly end well. But it's not his place to try and tell him how to live, and he suspects that trying wouldn't get him anywhere. So he has to accept that it simply is what it is. “But I'm sure I'll figure it out once I get there.”

“So you're going to move across the country to probably end up waiting tables,” he says flatly.

“That's entirely possible,” he says goodnaturedly. He can be infuriatingly agreeable when he wants to be, and it makes Felix want to punch him. “But that’s the fun part, right? It will be my choice to make.”

Felix understands, he does. And he can’t blame Sylvain for wanting to get as far away from his family and the pressures that come from being the preferred child of the Gautier family. He just wishes that he could be rebellious a little bit closer to home; he’s not about to say that, though, and he hopes that maybe Sylvain knows it’s how he feels nonetheless.

And maybe he does, because on the night before Sylvain is set to leave, they talk. Sylvain drives them out to the middle of nowhere, far enough away from town that you can actually see the stars, an abandoned gas station that time has forgotten.

(It’s the same place that they would go as teenagers, when Sylvain would steal from his parents’ liquor cabinet and try to talk his friends into making bad decisions with him. Felix would only sometimes play along - Dimitri never did, too flustered by the thought of doing something illegal, and Ingrid could drink them all under the table if she tried - but mostly he would end up just tipsy enough that all he wanted to do was cling to Sylvain. He allowed it.

It’s also where he once saw a possum clambering about behind a dumpster taken over by ivy and Felix, drunk enough to listen to dares from Sylvain, offered it a piece of pizza crust. It had eyed him with great distrust and bared its teeth until he left it alone.

And perhaps most importantly, it’s where he first kissed Sylvain. He was seventeen and impulsive and he’d needed to find some way to shut Sylvain up when he wouldn’t fucking stop talking.)

Sylvain hefts himself up onto the roof of his car and then holds a hand out to Felix to help him up, a maneuver made familiar over years of repetition. He settles in against Sylvain’s side, no longer shy about initiating affection when they’re alone.

For a bit, they don’t say much of anything, just sitting there and staring up at the sky. Sylvain points out constellations to him, tells him stories that he’s heard plenty of times before and yet never tires of hearing from the man’s lips. Felix’s ability at identifying the constellations more or less ends with finding Orion’s belt, and as much as he scoffs at the idea that a god had ever put the constellations in the sky, maybe he enjoys the stories in spite of himself; he had always had a quiet fondness for Aquila.

That night, Sylvain points out the lyre that had belonged to Orpheus. “It was said that his song was so beautiful that he could charm anything, even inanimate objects. Maybe he could have gotten through to your stone cold heart,” he teases, tossing Felix a wink and simply laughing warmly when he tries to protest. He takes hold of Felix's hand and laces their fingers together as he carries on with the familiar story. “And it was no exception when his wife Eurydice died; when he went to the Underworld, Hades and Persephone were so moved by his song that he was able to bargain for her life.”

Felix knows the story by now, knows how it will never end in anything other than a tragedy, and he wonders why Sylvain holds these stories so fondly. He tucks his head against his shoulder and listens nonetheless.

“The condition Hades gave was that Orpheus had to walk in front of her and he wasn't allowed to look back. He just had to trust that Eurydice was behind him,” he carries on. “The exact details vary, but the bottom line is that when he was almost at the end of his journey back, he looked back at her. And for that, she was returned to the Underworld forever.” 

“That's pretty fucked up.”

“Most of Greek mythology was, to be fair,” Sylvain says with a soft laugh. He leans back, looking up at the sky for another moment before letting his eyes fall shut. For once, he actually looks at peace, and Felix wishes that he could bottle up this feeling, for both of them.

Sylvain's index finger traces patterns over the back of Felix's hand, and he tries to recreate them in his mind to figure out what he's drawing; he's never been able to piece it together.

“I'm going to miss you,” Sylvain says when they've been silent for a couple of minutes.

Glancing over at him, he almost considers acting aloof about it, as he usually does. Even though they have never been anything official, he does know that he is one of the few things that could actually tether Sylvain to this place. As much as he wants to keep him here, he can't in good conscience do so. But he would also be doing both of them a disservice by lying, and he also isn't about to make that one of his last moments with Sylvain. “I'll miss you too,” he says finally, leaning a bit more heavily into him.

“Yeah?” he asks, and he must be a bigger idiot than Felix remembers, because he actually sounds like he's a little bit surprised to hear it.

“Of course I will.” He's not about to get sappy about it, though he could; it might sound like a line Sylvain might say, but he really isn't sure what the landscape of his life will look like without him in it.

“Oh. Good,” he says, looking at him with unbridled affection in his features. It almost makes Felix doubt his decision to not ask him to stay. “You know… You could come along.”

“Come along?” he echoes. “And do what?”

“I don't know. But that's part of the fun of it, right? You and me, out there, doing whatever we want to do. Working odd jobs or something. I was actually thinking that I might try out acting. If I make it big, we won't even have to worry about money.” He laughs at his own words, and Felix is grateful; just thinking about trying to explain to him how ridiculous a thought it is is exhausting.

Felix raises an eyebrow at him, allowing himself to play along. “And what would I do? I'm not about to play housewife for you.”

“No, definitely not. But hey, I know that glint in your eye when we watch Forged in Fire. You could become a bladesmith.”

The idea holds appeal. But it's just a fantasy, and he can't let himself get caught up in fantasies. “I can't believe you've armed me in this made up life you've made for us,” he comments. “Get on my nerves one too many times, and I'll have a home full of blades to stab you with.”

“Worth it,” he says easily, waving off the words. “Maybe if I'm famous enough, they'll make one of those true crime documentaries about it.”

In spite of himself, Felix laughs. “You're such a fucking idiot.”

“Yeah, probably.”

They settle into quiet for a moment, but the air grows heavy between them again quickly. The fact is, Felix can't come along. He doesn't know if he even wants to, but he needs to stay here. Despite his mixed feelings about his own family and Dimitri and this whole town, he still cares. He can't walk away from Dimitri now.

He knows he doesn't have to say it out loud for Sylvain to know it, no matter how nice a thought it is to carve out a life by his side.

“Maybe you can come visit, once I get settled,” Sylvain says eventually.

“Maybe I could,” he agrees with a small nod. “I might like that.”

And that's as far as that discussion goes. It's on the tip of Felix's tongue to try and tell Sylvain how much he means to him, or to convince him to stick around, but he doesn't. He wonders if Sylvain is feeling the same way. Neither of them voice it.

They just sit there, and Sylvain points out a few more constellations, until eventually Felix gets cold and they head back to town, where without words they also decide that Sylvain will spend the night with Felix.

The next morning, Felix drives him to the airport; he's leaving his car with his parents, which is reasonable enough in spite of his reasoning that 'no one in LA drives anyway'.

On the way, he asks to stop at a convenience store, where he comes back out with a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bouquet of flowers that looks like it has seen better days. He presents these to Felix with a small smile, though he simply raises an eyebrow at him in question.

“What’s that all about?”

“It’s a parting gift,” he says. “The least I could do to say thank you, you know?”

“You didn’t have to thank me at all,” he says. “I don’t know how to care for flowers.”

“Put them in water, and watch them slowly die,” he says with a shrug.

“You’re an idiot,” he accuses, but he opens the soda and takes a slow sip of it before he starts the car again.

When they reach the airport, Sylvain lingers before he goes down to security. He stands in front of Felix and frames his face in his hands, and even though most of the time Felix thinks it would be horrifying to be able to read Sylvain's mind, he's curious about what's happening in there at this moment.

“I'm going to keep in touch. I'll probably annoy you with how much I text you.”

Felix rolls his eyes and makes his best attempt at looking annoyed with him. “I'm already annoyed just thinking about it,” he says. “Just don't get upset when I don't text back as much.”

“You're not a texter, I know,” he says. He leans in and kisses him, and his hands hold onto him just a little bit tighter for a moment, and Felix almost thinks that he's having second thoughts. “I'll miss you.”

“You said that already,” he points out.

“Not today. I want to be sure you don't forget,” he says.

“I won't.”

He leans up to kiss Sylvain again, to tell him without words that he will miss him too.

When he pulls back, Sylvain smiles back at him and he tries not to notice how it's a little bit sad. There's no point in either of them being sad, least of all Sylvain - this is a choice he made, after all.

“See you, Syl.”

“See you, Fe.”

He stands there and watches as Sylvain walks away, waiting until he can no longer see him before he shakes himself out of whatever this mood is and heads back out to his car. Sylvain doesn’t look back.

* * *

He's not usually a dramatic person, and he recognizes his reaction to Sylvain leaving is an overreaction.

He's still living with Annette, who is usually a ray of sunshine who could cut through the darkest of his moods - by force. Ordinarily, he would welcome this, but he’s just feeling… down. He knows that it’s ridiculous, and only two days after Sylvain flew across the country he has already spoken on the phone with him as many times, but he still feels unsettled.

She does manage to drag him out of his room on the third day, though she only really gets as far as getting him to spend time with her in the common spaces of their apartment, and to eat the breakfast she’d made for them (miraculously, she’s gotten better in the time they’ve lived together, and the apartment building hasn’t been set ablaze).

“You’re grumpy because of Sylvain?” she asks him as he spears a sausage link with his fork. There isn’t any judgment in her voice, but he feels judged anyway; it’s probably just him, judging himself.

“I wouldn’t say grumpy,” he says.

Annette looks at him with a small frown, shaking her head. “Well, maybe not grumpy. But I thought that calling it that might make it a little bit more palatable.”

“Right,” he says. “Well, whatever it is, sure. It’s because of Sylvain.” He knows better than to lie to her.

“And you promise that there isn’t anything that you’re not telling me about your relationship with him?” she asks. Her prying would be a lot more frustrating if she wasn’t as endearing as she is.

“I doubt that I would have been able to hide it from you if there was anything happening you didn’t already know,” he says, because not only does she pry, but she pries  _ effectively _ .

Annette shrugs, ripping a piece of muffin from the wrapper and popping it into her mouth. “You can be secretive when you want to,” she says. “And I figured, I don’t know, either you were extra sad because either you utterly failed to tell him how you feel, or because you  _ did _ tell him and either he rejected you - impossible - or you had to say goodbye to your brand new boyfriend.”

“It isn’t any of those. Saying that I failed to confess to Sylvain implies that I ever intended to,” he points out.

“I still don’t see why you shouldn’t,” she says. “He obviously feels the same.”

Felix has his doubts about that, but they’ve had that conversation before. He’s never managed to convince her; they’re at an impasse, though, because she’s never convinced him, either. “That doesn’t make it better,” he points out. “It might have made him change his mind.”

Sighing, she takes a sip from her mug; he knows by now that this means he’s as good as won. “I’m also not sure that that would be such a bad thing,” she says, shaking her head. “I’m worried about him out there.”

“I am, too,” he says, and it’s then that he takes his leave, returning back to his room. His phone is still plugged in, and pathetically the last thing he had up was his text message chain with Sylvain. His heart absolutely does not do a little leap in his chest at the mere sight of his name. Unfortunately, however, there are no new messages, so he swipes the app away and curls back up on his bed to distract himself with YouTube videos.

Felix tries to tell himself that this is just the latest in Sylvain's impulsive ideas. Without a plan, he's probably not going to be gone long. Soon he’ll be back and they’ll make out in this very same bed, and Sylvain will laugh at him for even having been sad about his absence to begin with.

* * *

What Felix failed to consider is how things always seem to work out for Sylvain. He fails but always ends up succeeding in the end; he trips his way up the stairs and always lands on his feet.

(He had refused to take his first couple of semesters seriously and had subsequently failed out of his first college - or, as he had liked to put it, they had “declined to invite him back” - but had somehow ended up closer to home at a better school, and eventually got a scholarship.

Though, that one, at least, Felix can understand. Sylvain is smart, always has been, and he’s better at studying than Felix can wrap his head around.)

So maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise that Sylvain managed to succeed and make important, influential connections surprisingly quickly. He does, actually, start out with waiting tables. Months go by where he’s just spinning his wheels, seemingly just skating by and continuing to not have a real, solid plan. As time marches forward, each day Felix starts to expect more and more to hear from him saying that he is finally coming home, and could he stay with Felix for a bit?

And then, apparently, just like something out of a movie, he happens to wait on - and apparently utterly charm, to hear him tell it - a casting director, and he gets himself a gig.

Granted, the gig is a pharmaceutical commercial, but even Felix can acknowledge that it’s better than nothing. Certainly better than Sylvain could have hoped for.

After Sylvain mentions the commercial, though, he almost entirely forgets about it until one afternoon Claude comes barging through his office door, without knocking, announcing that he needs “to get a load of this.”

“Get a load of what?” he asks, because he is here to work.

“Your loverboy,” he says as he sits down on the edge of Felix’s desk, phone in hand, poking at the screen for a moment. While he understands that Claude is actually an incredibly clever man and exactly the sort of businessman that they need to keep the company afloat given how soft-hearted Dimitri is and how disinterested in corporate politics Felix is, sometimes he can be a bit much.

In particular, he can’t help but bristle at the casual way he refers to Sylvain as Felix’s ‘loverboy’, and how he doesn’t even have to ask Claude who he’s referring to. He’s not sure when or how the man was clued in to the fact that there is unresolved romantic tension between him and Sylvain, especially because they actually haven’t really seen that much of each other outside of work settings; ultimately, he suspects that it’s Dimitri’s fault. When Claude is around, he turns far too chatty. “Don’t call him that,” he says, but it’s a token protest; he knows there is no stopping that train.

“Sure, sure. So, the commercial is out.”

“What commer - oh,” he says. In spite of himself, he does, absolutely, suddenly want to watch the commercial.

“Yeah, that,” Claude says, turning his phone around to hand it over to Felix. When he hits play, he leans over into his personal space to watch the commercial as well.

Truth be told, it’s nothing special, really. The first half of it does involve Sylvain making a few terrible faces and uncomfortably excusing himself from various social situations, and there’s something about seeing him in a sweater vest walking a dog while holding hands with a woman who is dressed to be equally Very Nice that Felix can’t help himself but to chuckle at.

(Felix had already known about the dog. Sylvain had sent him pictures and announced he was going to steal her.)

“It’s gold, right?” Claude says when the video ends, leaning back again. “Nothing quite like seeing a guy pretend to have terribly troubled bowels.”

Felix stares at the screen for a moment longer, stuck on a frozen image of Sylvain in a kayak. “In real life, if he had such bad toilet troubles, he would be curled up in a ball in the bathroom all day,” he says, though he’s not entirely sure why he’s volunteering that information.To be fair, Sylvain has always been far too open anyway; he probably wouldn’t mind.

Laughing, he reaches out to take his phone back from him. “And yet, you’re into him anyway.”

“Whatever,” he says. He isn’t about to point out that Sylvain has seen him in much sorrier states than that; there are some lines not to be crossed. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“Sure, sure,” Claude says as he gets back to his feet, waving his hand dismissively. “I’m going to take breaks when I want to; it’s good for productivity.”

“I’m going to tell Dimitri to fire you.”

“Go ahead and try,” he says, looking back at him with a wink before heading for the door.

(And how fucking dare Dimitri gossip about him and Sylvain when whatever this is is happening at the same time.)

* * *

Felix doesn’t even watch much TV. It has always felt like a waste of time to him to sit so passively in front of a screen doing absolutely nothing. It’s for similar reasons that he doesn’t do social media.

(Although, Annette had helped him to sign up for Twitter and Instagram and oh so charitably had not said anything when the two accounts he had followed on each were solely hers and Sylvain’s.)

But it’s different when it’s Sylvain, because fucking everything is different with Sylvain. The jerk could read a phonebook and somehow, somehow Felix would still sit there and watch him, riveted. It’s a disease, is what it is.

The bottom line is, when Ingrid flops herself down onto the couch and announces that she’s got a couple of episodes Sylvain’s show banked up to watch if he wants to join her, he shrugs and tells her to go ahead and watch, and maybe he’ll stick around to catch some of it.

The show isn't great. But it's actually shown on television, primetime even, and he can't help but actually feel happy for Sylvain. If this is his new dream, well. Felix can be supportive.

That said…

“I hate the main character. Are we supposed to be able to root for her?” he asks.

Ingrid hums and nods in affirmation, taking a handful of popcorn and shoveling it into her mouth. Once she's swallowed, she says, “I think the idea is that she's flawed, so the audience can relate to her.”

“She isn't relatable, she's just an idiot,” he says.

“It's a sitcom, and this is just the second episode anyway. We don't know what her arc looks like.”

“Her arc looks like perving on Sylvain's character, mostly. Who, by the way, is even more of an idiot than her.”

“You can't say it doesn't suit him,” Ingrid says, laughing at her own joke and shaking her head.

* * *

It hits him like a bolt of lightning when he sees Sylvain again.

For a second, he's sure he's seeing things. He cannot possibly believe for a second that Sylvain would come back across the country and not at least say something about it. But no, he's calling his name and walking over to him, and he's as stupidly handsome as ever. He looks better in real life than on his awful television show.

He spends the entire visit feeling like he’s losing his mind a little bit. He wants to be upset with him for just showing up so casually, but he always wants to not waste a single second. He’s never been good with moderating his feelings or properly conveying them with words, so he does the next best thing - he tries to show Sylvain physically, tries to say it into his mouth or against his skin. He suspects it’s a mixed success.

A part of him feels like he should have the conversation now that he didn’t have before Sylvain left the first time. But things feel so good, so natural, and he isn’t exactly keen on ruining the mood. He’s ruined far too many moods in his life, and while Sylvain is resilient enough to almost always bounce back with no issues, he still doesn’t particularly want to waste a second.

But still, near the end of the visit he can’t help but say something.

“What’s it like out there?”

“Huh?”

“California. Los Angeles. Your whole new life,” he gestures vaguely with his hand as he speaks - it’s all the same thing. “What’s it like for you?”

The thing is, really, that Felix does want him to be happy, no matter the cost to him. The only problem with that, however, is that he really isn’t even sure if Sylvain is happy at all. Yes, he’s got a solid job going and he’s making money again and he’s got the freedom that Felix knows he has always craved and that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t actually mean that he’s  _ happy _ .

When he deflects the question and just talks about how nice everyone is on set, it is somehow both not at all surprising and also surprisingly painful. Sylvain should know, he would have thought, not to bullshit him. They know each other too well.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” he says, and he can see that, for a moment, Sylvain is preparing himself to get defensive. He can’t blame him for it, not really, but Felix absolutely didn’t start this conversation looking for a fight; he just seems to have a way with making things into fights, even when he doesn’t intend to. But just as quickly, that expression melts away from his face, and he just looks… lost.

“You don’t talk about having friends. Even that cake girl - she’s your neighbor, she’s not your friend. And that’s fine for some people, but that’s not the kind of person you are,” he points out. Sure, he’s certain that the confections he gets from her bring him joy for whatever reason, but that’s not  _ friendship _ .

“I mean, I have friends out there. I hang out.”

The conversation goes on like this for a bit longer, with Felix desperately wishing that he could shake some sense into Sylvain and/or convince him that whatever he feels about his life right now is surely fleeting - or to have Sylvain convince him that that’s not the case, but ultimately he thinks they both walk away from it unfulfilled. He at least gets the assurance that Sylvain hasn’t been sleeping around, which, if he’s going to be honest, hadn’t actually occurred to him to be worried about.

“You look tired in a lot of the pictures I’ve seen,” he says. He hopes that Sylvain understands what he means without him having to say it: he means I care about you and I want to be sure that you’re okay.

“Well, like I said, I’m working a lot. Or if I’m not working, I’m trying to make the connections I need to get a leg up, you know?” It’s an excuse, but at least there’s some honesty there.

Still, Felix realizes that maybe he’s better off not leaving things to chance; Sylvain, in spite of how perceptive he is, sometimes isn’t the best at figuring out subtext. “Don’t forget to take care of yourself.”

And that, he thinks, is enough, because for a moment they’re both quiet, and all is as well as it can be, because he’s curled up with Sylvain and he’s come to associate that with comfort above all else. “I love you,” Sylvain says, and Felix feels like his heart is about to short out.

This, too, doesn’t come as a surprise, even though neither of them have said it, except perhaps as children. But he’s known, implicitly, that Sylvain loves him, knows it down to the marrow in his bones. Maybe, though, it’s one thing to know it and another to hear it in actual words, because something in him feels  _ warm _ . Still, it comes oh so naturally to simply say back, “I love you too.” He makes direct eye contact as he says it, needing Sylvain to know just how deeply he means it.

He isn’t sure when he falls asleep, because he hadn’t actually intended to. He means to stay awake longer, out of some ridiculous, sentimental desire to be with Sylvain for as long as possible, even if the man is asleep.

But instead he finds himself blinking his eyes open to find that rather than it being later in the evening, they’ve left the lamp on the bedside table on all night and it’s about the time that he might ordinarily be considering going for a run. But it’s too damn cold out, and Sylvain is providing a wonderful argument against it purely by being warm and still having his arms wrapped around Felix. He doubts he could even get up without waking Sylvain up, and with him awake to argue against it, Felix absolutely wouldn’t be going anywhere anyway.

So he lays there, just looking at Sylvain. There’s just a hint of a smile on his face as he sleeps, the happy bastard, and he looks genuinely well-rested for the first time in recent memory. Felix isn’t about to trumpet his own involvement in that, but he would be lying if he said it doesn’t feel like a victory.

He alternates between observing Sylvain - counting the tiny freckles that dot his skin - and dozing off, and once enough time has passed that he’s confident he won’t fuss at him about the early hour, he kisses him awake.

Soon Sylvain talks him into taking a shower together (“it’s better for the planet to save water, after all”), and when they greet the day, there’s a certain lightness in Felix’s chest that carries him through until it’s time for Sylvain to go.

He hopes that another surprise storm pops up and grounds Sylvain’s plane so that he’s stuck for at least another day. Mother Nature is not so kind as to make that happen.

* * *

Despite genuinely intending to, and promising to over text in the days after Sylvain returns from his Christmas visit, Felix doesn’t actually end up visiting Sylvain. It’s for the best, probably; just on principle, he has absolutely no interest in ever setting foot in Los Angeles. It sounds like a horrible town full of horrible people and worse traffic, with a cost of living that makes him wonder how Sylvain didn’t fucking die.

Sylvain does visit home more often, though.

It still isn't what he knows it probably ought to be. Them both confessing to their feelings aloud was actually not a sudden miracle fix-all; Felix knows that he shouldn't have expected it to be. He had almost been expecting it when Sylvain said it, after all, and he doubts it was a surprise for him when Felix said it back. So while they need to have the big, scary 'define the relationship' conversation, Felix honestly isn't that worried about it. They see each other more regularly; they FaceTime more, and Sylvain dedicates more pockets of time to coming home.

They do talk more openly about a lot of things. He admits that maybe he had felt a bit abandoned when Sylvain had left. Sylvain admits that he does feel secluded where he is and LA has never become home despite how long he's lived there, but also says that he doesn't want to just up and leave even if he could. And that's probably the crux of the thing: they talk about their feelings, and their situations, and the bottom line for them both is that they want to be together, but the distance is an obstacle that they can't quite overcome. So it's easier to dance around the issue instead of facing it head on and admitting a kind of defeat.

Still, he feels lighter because of all of it. He doesn't feel crushed by it every time Sylvain leaves. It helps, he thinks, that the redhead also looks happier, less tired every time he comes back.

A day after every visit, Felix receives a bouquet of flowers, which every time he insists is entirely unnecessary. Still, he always makes sure to keep a flower or two from each delivery to hold onto.

(Begrudgingly, he asks Hilda how best to preserve the flowers, and after the requisite teasing, she’s a surprisingly good teacher on the subject.)

“You're dating in every way that matters except in name,” Claude, maybe the only practical, reasonable one among their group of friends (yes, he's including Ingrid. She could be swayed from any of her convictions for a bucket of fried chicken), comments one evening after Sylvain has left.

Because Felix is still Felix, he just looks at him. “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“What I'm talking about is the fact that you act like you're a married couple. You both know you're in love with each other, you are constantly texting and calling each other. You're not seeing other people,” he says, holding up a hand to count off each of these points on his fingers. Admittedly, when it's all laid out like this, it does feel a little bit incriminating. “And honestly, most of the time when people are like that, the only thing missing is sex. But you  _ have _ sex. You just won't call it what it is.”

“I don't see what the big deal is if we're both okay with it,” he says.

Dimitri, for his part, has mostly been keeping his lips sealed on this point. Probably because he knows that he and Claude had been just as terrible about not directly addressing their feelings for one another; hell, Sylvain and Felix have that up on them. “And you’re sure that you’re okay with it?” he asks finally, though.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” he asks.

“It just strikes me that… well, it’s not my place to assume, but I know it would make me feel better in your situation if I could either be closer to the person I love, or to have a label to put on it. Something real, no matter how superficial the title of ‘boyfriend’ is.”

“Maybe. I mean, would I prefer to be with him? Sure,” he says with a small shrug, because that point has certainly never been under any contention. “But Sylvain is also allowed to do what he wants. I’m not going to hold him back from sleeping with other people if that’s what he wants to do, and he isn’t going to fall in love with anyone else because he doesn’t form emotional bonds with people.” He’s usually not one to air out that sort of thing - but everyone here knows everyone else’s fucked up shit they keep hidden away in their closets.

Claude, the king of not trusting people, laughs. “Alright, you’ve got a point there.”

“I know I do.”

“I think the real question here, really, is about what the long term goal is,” Ingrid says from where she’s lounged on the couch, looking half-melted against the cushions with her feet propped up on the coffee table (it’s only unacceptable when someone else does it, which may actually be fair, because no one has longer days than Ingrid). “You can’t possibly be alright with just doing this forever, boyfriends or not.”

Admittedly, Felix can’t deny that. Even though things have been good recently, that doesn’t take away from the fact that this can’t last forever the way it’s currently working. It’s exhausting in its own way, and not just because he often has to stay up far too late to talk to Sylvain to make up for the time difference between them. “When the time comes, we’ll figure out a plan,” he says.

“You could just pack up your things and wing it, like he did,” Claude suggests, giving him a little wink that makes it clear that he in no way believes that Felix could or would do such a thing.

“Not without a job out there,” he says. He almost points out that he can’t leave his current career without letting Dimitri’s company implode, but frankly speaking things are going pretty well (Goddess forbid Dimitri and Claude ever break up, because things absolutely would fall to shit then).

“Boring, but practical,” he allows. His eyes light up a second later, and Felix doesn’t want to hear it. “Or, you could be his sugar baby.”

“No,” he says, nipping this in the bud, because there is absolutely no way he is allowing anyone to report back to Sylvain with the phrase ‘sugar baby’ in their vocabulary. He's certainly also not going to tell them that Sylvain had once offered him more or less the same thing, though he hadn't called it by that name.

From there, the subject changes, for which he’s overall grateful (although unfortunately, they linger on the topic of sugar daddies in general, debating which one of them could be the best sugar daddy). He doesn’t have answers for them, really, and he doesn’t want to think about it. The way he sees it, there are two real options for them: either they take a leap and commit, or eventually they reach a breaking point and have to move on.

Felix never visits Sylvain in Los Angeles, and then he moves to Chicago.

* * *

Chicago, however, he does make work.

Sylvain is all theatrics when Felix arrives in the Windy City. He’s visiting for a long weekend, and they agree that it isn’t really enough time. Felix thinks that that might mean that they’ll spend more of that time just soaking up each other’s company, maybe enjoying the far-too-big-for-one-person and surely-too-expensive apartment that  _ doesn’t _ have roommates or a clingy dog in it.

Instead, Sylvain has an itinerary for them.

Well, that's not quite fair. When he first picks him up at the airport, he brings him straight back to his apartment and sets him up with a quick tour, a couple of fresh towels if he wants to shower, and instructions to make himself comfortable. From there, he heads back out to pick up dinner for them, despite Felix’s protests that he could just come along, or they could order something in pizza or something.

“Oh, we’re having pizza,” he says, cryptic as hell, and then leaves Felix to his own devices.

Felix showers, and helps himself to one of Sylvain’s shirts in spite of having packed plenty of his own clothing (arguably too much, but Annette had come over to help him and she’d insisted that he be ready for anything, in spite of his insistence that all he needs to be ‘ready’ is comfortable clothing he can move easily in). He walks around the apartment, taking his time actually acquainting himself with his environment; it’s decorated simply, but it feels like a place that Sylvain would live. He keeps the place neat - though if Felix ever stays for any amount of time, he will surely ruin that - and there are photos hung up on the walls, arranged with care. He recognizes most of them. Hell, he’s in a majority of them.

He’s back on the couch by the time Sylvain returns, poking away at his phone. He abandons it when he catches a whiff of what certainly is pizza sauce, glancing down at the box Sylvain is carrying. “So you did get pizza,” he says. “Why couldn’t you have just gotten it delivered?”

“I could have, but we would’ve waited longer. And I think it’s better fresher, they always take too long getting it to you if you leave it to them,” he explains. “Now then, we’re beginning to give you the true Chicago experience: Giordano’s, basically an obligatory stop for any tourist in Chicago.”

“I’m not a tourist,” he protests, though at a certain point he supposes yes, maybe he kind of is a tourist. In a sense. He doesn’t enjoy touring. He barely likes going places - that’s why Sylvain had had the wisdom to pick up food for them to begin with.

Sylvain raises an eyebrow at him and shakes his head. “Babe, we’re gonna be tourists,” he says.

He can’t even bring himself to insist that he shouldn’t call him ‘babe’, because there’s just that excitement in Sylvain’s face that he can’t take from him, and honestly, just being here with him feels so  _ good  _ that it’s hard to be anything other than happy and maybe even a little bit excited, too.

He leans over and kisses Sylvain’s cheek rather than trying to express that in words, then redirects his attention by looking down at the pizza. “This is possibly the ugliest pizza I’ve ever seen. Where is the cheese, Sylvain?”

“It’s called deep dish, you uncultured asshole,” he says, even as he laughs. “It’s basically what Chicago is known for.”

Felix huffs. “That doesn’t answer my question about the cheese.”

“Let’s just give it a shot, okay?”

So he does. And as it turns out, he can agree that maybe deep dish pizza isn’t so bad, and maybe there is enough cheese on it that Dimitri would enjoy it. But he’s still going to land on sticking with ‘normal’ pizza.

After they’ve had their fill of the pizza, they try to make out for a bit until they decide that the pizza breath is too much of a deterrent, and then they curl up together on the couch and Sylvain turns on some music for them and it’s... It’s nice. They talk about how things are going in their respective lives, and how Sylvain is settling in here. He can’t tell Felix a whole lot about the show that he moved out here for, even though Felix tells him he wouldn’t tell anybody the details because why would he, but it’s going to be on HBO, which means that they’ll “be able to show real tits.”

“Is that supposed to entice me to pay for HBO? I don’t care about tits,” he said.

“Hey, rude, you like my tits,” he says.

Rolling his eyes, Felix knows that he can’t  _ quite _ deny that, but not how it stands. “Your  _ tits _ ,” he says, his hand moving up to squeeze at Sylvain’s pec, “can be shown on any channel. And you send me enough pictures that I absolutely do not need to watch some topless woman pawing at you on television just to enjoy them.”

“Mm… such a way with words, Fe,” he says, laughing though he grabs at Felix’s hand to guide it instead underneath his shirt. “And don’t worry, this show won’t involve much pawing at me. Probably. Even if it does end up going that way, don’t worry: your hands will always be my favorites.”

It’s not quite a love declaration, but Felix’s heart is strangely warmed anyways, and he fully blames Sylvain for that feeling. He nips at his shoulder, coming up with only the fabric of his shirt in his mouth, but he assumes his message comes across nonetheless. “I better be,” he tells him.

“You always will be,” he says, as sincere as any other reassurance he’s ever given him. “And you’ll always be my favorite person to grope.”

* * *

In the morning, Sylvain’s itinerary comes into play in full, and Felix somewhat suspects that it’s just an excuse to do all the kinds of touristy things that he might have liked to do otherwise but didn’t want to do on his own. Because he loves him, Felix finds himself willing to indulge him. It’s a whirlwind, and he feels like he’s taking in a whole lot and nothing all at once.

For lunch he brings him to a place called Portillo’s and they manage to find a little booth in the corner.

“Try this,” Sylvain tells him as he puts his styrofoam cup in his face, and Felix eyes it suspiciously. It had been too loud for him to be able to hear as he placed his order, although admittedly the fact is that he’s going to try whatever it is, whether or not it’s in his best interests.

He takes a sip and immediately recoils, looking down at the cup with a frown. “What the hell did you just feed me?” he asks.

“Chocolate cake shake,” he answers, a grin on his face that Felix can tell is just barely holding back a big, boisterous laugh. “I knew you wouldn’t try it if I just told you what it was.”

“Chocolate cake shake,” he repeats slowly, trying to piece the words together in his mind. “You’re exactly right that I wouldn’t have tried it, that’s… a monstrosity.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, and he doesn’t offer any further justification than that.

Admittedly, Felix thinks that he might be able to see the appeal if he liked chocolate cake to begin with, but it’s far too decadent and sweet and he just doesn’t see the point. Watching Sylvain drink it makes him feel mildly nauseated, but it doesn’t seem to bother the redhead in the slightest.

In the afternoon, they go on an architecture river cruise, even though neither of them is too interested in architecture. That turns out to be a good thing, because from where they end up sitting, they absolutely cannot hear anything the tour guide is saying. But there’s a full bar available on the ship, so in the end it’s a good time overall. They get the pleasant kind of buzzed that makes them decide to forget about the rest of their plans and just go back to Sylvain’s apartment, which was always going to be preferable to Felix, really.

The next day, they go and do more sightseeing. He’s almost surprised that it has taken until now for Sylvain to drag him to Millenium Park, and once they get there, he’s immediately back to playing good host for Felix. “Here it is: the Bean,” he says as he drags him to stand under the gigantic sculpture. Other tourists are milling about around them, taking selfies that Felix suspects will only barely show any of the landmark behind them. “So, the actual name of this thing is Cloud Gate, and I’ve heard that the artist, Anish Kapoor doesn’t like it when it’s called the Bean. But do you remember the whole Vantablack thing?”

“I really don’t,” he says, staring up at their reflections in the stainless steel. There’s something strangely distorted about the way they look in the curved metal, but Felix still can’t help but think that he looks like he belongs where he’s tucked up close by Sylvain’s side.

“Ah, well. It’s this whole thing, I’ll tell you about it sometime,” he says, chuckling softly as he looks up at their reflection as well. He reaches his arm out, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and tugging him in closer. It feels all the more perfect.

He fishes his phone out of his pocket with his free hand and aims the camera up at the reflective surface. “C’mon, smile for me, Felix,” he urges, and he obliges as Sylvain takes several pictures of their reflection. Deciding that that’s not quite enough, he pulls away, taking hold of Felix’s hand as he leads him out from underneath the sculpture and captures the attention of a random passerby to take a picture of them.

She takes the phone and then stops for a second, looking up at him with eyes that go cartoonishly wide. “I - Are you Sylvain Gautier?” she asks, and it catches Felix off-guard how she genuinely seems kind of starstruck.

For his part, Sylvain doesn’t seem to miss a beat. “In the flesh,” he says.

“Oh, wow,” she says, a little laugh escaping her as she stares at him. “I never thought I’d just run into a celebrity.”

Laughing, he gives her a quick wink. “Well, guess it’s just your lucky day. It’s always nice to meet a fan.”

And it’s frustrating, though at the same time Felix feels like he has absolutely no place to be jealous, if that’s even what this feeling is. Sylvain, technically speaking, isn’t his. But it’s also not like there’s anything even actually happening with this girl, but Felix knows that charm and has spent too much of his life watching it be directed at women who would never genuinely earn Sylvain’s time or affection. “Come on, let’s take the picture,” he says, his hand coming to grip Sylvain’s arm.

The girl suddenly seems to realize that he’s there as well, her eyes somehow seeming to get even wider as she looks from Sylvain to him and back again. “Oh!” she says. “I didn’t realize you have a boyfriend.”

Felix fully expects him to brush it off in some way, because, well, he’s not actually Sylvain’s boyfriend. “Most people don’t,” Sylvain says instead, smiling at her before leading Felix back to get into place, wrapping his arm around his shoulder as she takes a few pictures for them. When they part ways, Sylvain looks at the pictures and shows them to Felix, commenting on how the city skyline looks reflected in the Bean, but he doesn’t actually care whether it’s a good photo or not.

The thing is, at one point Felix had worried about what might happen if Sylvain actually got to become famous. He’s always had a strange relationship with his ego and everyone else’s expectations for him, and Felix knew well enough to know that he wasn’t as full of himself as he seemed to be to the casual observer. He had thought that having so many external forces - so many strangers - filling him with new expectations might do harm, though he had never been sure what form that might take. One way or another, he feared, he wouldn’t get to keep the Sylvain he had grown up with, the Sylvain he’d spent years now loving.

But Sylvain just looks back at him as he puts the phone in his pocket so that he can take hold of his hand again, and it feels like maybe he worried too much for nothing. The look in his eyes is the same as ever, and he’s seemed to have always found his way back to Felix just fine.

* * *

Even after having watched Sylvain leave and seeing how much trouble he had with it, Felix doesn’t really expect to have that much trouble packing up his things and leaving Sylvain’s apartment.

“I don’t want to go home,” he mumbles as he turns over and presses his face into the pillow.

“You don’t mean that,” Sylvain protests, and he’s only somewhat sure that he’s right.

“Okay, fine,” he says after a brief pause where he considers it. “I won’t mind being home, but I don’t feel like leaving you.”

Letting out a soft hum, he nods along with that assessment. “Yeah, that’s fair,” he says. “I never want to leave you, either. It’s kind of nice not being the one leaving for once.”

“Don’t get too hasty,” he tells him, shifting so that he can turn back onto his side to look at Sylvain again. “If it’s anything like it is when you leave me after visits, this place will feel wrong without me in it.”

Sylvain’s response is immediate. “It always does.”

“Hm?”

“It never feels right to be anywhere if you’re not there by my side,” he explains with a small shrug. After a brief pause where neither of them speaks, he goes on, “I’ve been thinking about it a lot, actually.”

“Come to any conclusions?”

“Not really, if what you’re hoping for is a definitive solution,” he says, shrugging. “But I do know that the bottom line for me is that, well… You’re home to me, you know? Wherever you are, that’s where my home is.”

“That’s sappy as hell,” he tells him.

“Yeah, I know,” he grants. “But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

Felix sighs, leaning over and kissing him again. When he pulls back, he admits, “I think that’s what it might be for me, too. You’re home. Even though my whole life is back there, I…” He makes a frustrated sound, because expressing himself this way has never been his strong suit.

“I get it,” he says. “I know. And we’ll figure it out, sooner or later.”

But it’s been years now, and Felix almost feels like they’re not going to figure it out. Sylvain has only just settled down here, after all, and it feels like Felix’s roots are only growing deeper in the ground in New York. He still can’t ask Sylvain to come home, and he also still can’t up and join him in his new home.

He doesn’t voice that, instead getting up and dragging Sylvain with him to the bathroom so they can take one last shower together before he needs to get to the airport.

* * *

After that, time seems to stretch on.

Both of them are making frequent visits to the other, and at some point Sylvain has started to refer to him in his social media posts as his boyfriend and he doesn’t complain, so it feels like everything is better but the same at once.

(He’s thoughtful about it, too, where he’ll post pictures that feature him but never showing his face, not that Felix is that concerned about being recognized. But he’s gotten the impression that it’s, to an extent, because he feels like what they have is sacred and needs to be kept away from the scrutiny of the rest of the world.)

But even though things are good and their relationship is, realistically speaking, is in a better, more concrete place that it has ever been, he’s also… tired. He wants to be able to just start and end his days with seeing Sylvain. His sentimentality is coming to the surface in ways that he hadn’t thought would happen after he outgrew his childhood crybaby phase.

He isn’t letting it interfere with his day to day, not really, but to an extent he suspects that his friends know he spends not an insignificant number of his days just kind of phoning it in because he would rather be elsewhere.

One day he comes home and Dimitri and Claude are sitting on the living room couch, which on its own wouldn’t be that strange. They spend plenty of time together, after all. But there’s something in their body language when they both turn to look at him when he walks in that puts him a little bit on edge.

“Felix,” Dimitri says, straightening up and gesturing the seat beside him. “Won’t you join us?”

“My food is going to get cold,” he says, holding up the takeout bag he’s got in his hand.

“You can eat in front of us,” he says, shaking his head.

“Or it can wait,” he suggests.

Claude chuckles and shakes his head. “I just don’t think you’re actually gonna want it to wait.”

Raising an eyebrow, he sighs and goes over the back of the couch to sit down. He starts to unpack his dinner as he looks to Dimitri to get to whatever point he’s wanting to make. The way the blond is looking at him is unnerving.

“As we’re all aware, you have a bit of a predicament with Sylvain,” is the opening line he has apparently chosen, and Felix is all too tempted to just get up and walk out of the room.

“Predicament,” he echoes.

“What he means is that you feel stuck where you are in life, and I hear ya,” Claude says, a hand coming to rest on Dimitri’s knee. “But we think we’ve got a solution.”

“I don’t need you to solve my problems for me. What me and Sylvain have is our business, and we’re both happy with it,” he says.

“You’re not nearly as good a liar as you think you are.”

Dimitri doesn’t quite hide the amused smile on his lips. “Don’t think of it as something for you and Sylvain, then,” he says. “Because truth be told, this is for the good of the company, as well.” When Felix simply raises an eyebrow, he takes that as an invitation to go on. “We’ve been wanting to expand our reach for a while now, as you know. And that’s difficult to do when we only have a physical presence here. So, we’ve been entertaining the idea of getting a team together to start an office in Chicago. We would need someone to lead that team, of course.”

The room goes eerily quiet for a moment, the silence ringing in Felix’s ears as it all clicks into place.

“You’re inventing a position just to get me into Chicago,” he says, and under different circumstances he might have been a little bit bothered by them trying to get rid of him. It’s already awkward enough for him to try and wrap his head around them doing this for him.

“Genuinely speaking, we actually have been wanting to branch out into the midwest,” Claude says, shaking his head. “But when it occurred to us that we can kill two birds with one stone, well… It felt like it tied together with a neat little bow, don’t you think?”

“I suppose,” he says. And then, in spite of the fact that this truly is in his best interests, he can’t help but point out, “I don’t know if I’m the best person to be leading people.”

“There will be growing pains. And I’m sure you might ruffle some feathers, but if others are willing to relocate as well, then you’re starting with a foundation of people who already know you,” Dimitri tells him. “But no matter what, I trust you. Few people know this company like you, and there’s no one I would trust more with my father’s vision than you. Plus, well, there's already a home waiting for you there.” There’s an encouraging smile on his lips that tells him that if he wants it, all he has to do is say yes. Dimitri wants this for him.

Then comes the realization that while he had once felt that he couldn’t leave town for Dimitri’s sake, that’s no longer the case. He’s in a much better place now, after all, and the office here is in perfectly good hands between the two people in front of him. For once, maybe, the best thing that he can do is actually to go.

But still, though his heart aches to immediately go for it, to take the offer and run, he stops.

“Well, I’ll need to think about it,” he says. “And I’ll have to talk it over with Sylvain, because it isn’t as though I can just decide to move in with him without his consent.”

Claude gives him a look that says that he’s amused and a little bit in disbelief that he thinks he has to ask (fair, they all know that Sylvain absolutely will not say no to them being in the same place, especially if the cost of that is allowing Felix to live with him), but Dimitri gives him a smile and nods. “Of course. Take all the time you need,” he says, reaching out to give his hands a gentle squeeze. “Although, I do think we have something that might help you make your decision.”

Before he can ask what he’s talking about, Sylvain steps out of the closet near the door. He’ll later wonder how long he was cooped up in there waiting for Felix to get home and for this conversation to happen - it’s not a big closet, after all - but right now he’s a little bit too shocked by the fact that he’s here and he’s got a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a roll of packing tape in the other like he’s just so ready to help pack up Felix’s shit and he’s here and this feels like it’s actually happening and he’s  _ here _ .

“So, babe, what do you think?”

His heart leaps into his throat and he rushes over to kiss him because he can’t not kiss him, and he knows there was only ever one possible answer.

**Author's Note:**

> this originally included them actually moving in together and would have featured a brief cameo of raphael being a big strong helpful downstairs neighbor. just know, in your heart, that raphael lives in the apartment below felix and sylvain.
> 
> also this one time i ran into a celebrity outside of a shake shack in chicago. i cannot recall his name but my friend told me the show he was on filmed in chicago, in case you were wondering why i chose chicago
> 
> say hello on [twitter](https://twitter.com/bigfootsflannel) for more random anecdotes


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